JSON vs hstore - <AUTHOR> http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/07/03/json-vs-hstore-which-will-get-you-into-a-cool-bar-in-the-mission/

<comment> wh-uws So I'm using both types in a current personal project and I have to agree with the comment on the blog post

"[...] I use JSON for external application data that doesn't need to be interpreted by say, an SQL function or a trigger. Basically storage-only data..."

Basically I use hstore's as meta columns, for say a one off attribute of a model that I dont want to have as another column and have to do a migration. It is leaps and bounds better than using a text column because you can query.

JSON I use for basically caching api calls. For instance I save off the json from the itunes api for all of the albums of an artist or all of their songs.

It will be awesome when 9.3 comes out and you can query that though. That will be something.

</comment><comment><USER2> I also think of this in terms of viable development migration paths:

For example, 9.3's upcoming: hstore_to_json(hstore) and hstore_to_json_loose(hstore) open up possibilities. If an hstore datatype is chosen now, you can feel fairly confident that it can be fairly straightforwardly migrated to a native json datatype in 9.3 or later versions, when you feel the json featureset and stability may have become mature enough for your particular project's needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now all we need is EDN support in Postgres.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's the original post which fired off some further clarifications from Christophe:

[http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2013/07/03/hstore-vs- json/](http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2013/07/03/hstore-vs-json/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm really failing to understand obsession with unstructured types in Postgres? Why can't you just use native types for hierarchical structures?

Is it really that hard for people to maintain database changes?

<comment><USER6> I'm really failing to understand obsession with deriding people for solving problems that you personally don't have.

But yes, for some people it can be difficult to do this. It slows development, it makes programmers have to do sysadmin work (which in a two-person company without a specialised sysadmin can be difficult).

As another use-case, there was a point at which Twitter would take days or weeks to implement even minor schema changes across their entire MySQL cluster without impacting production.

And some people are solving problems that just do have unstructured or semi- structured data, rather than your assumption here that it's just a proxy for avoiding schema changes

<comment><USER7> Avoiding DB work strikes me as not the greatest reason to store JSON in your DB. But I find there are good reasons to do it. The main one for me is when the data fields are configurable by the user.

If I didn't want to be constrained by a schemas I'd just go with a NoSQL solution. Nothing wrong with that either.

<comment><USER8> Postgres can make a pretty nice "nosql" solution too. Either via hstore, json, or bytea. That said, nothing frees you from a schema. Not having it explicit in the database just means you have it encoded into your application code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> a bit more hands-on, but it's possible to create a functional index to improve json query performance in postgres:

[https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/6/5/javascript_in...](https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/6/5/javascript_in_your_postgres/)</comment>


A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed? - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091009-dinosaur-species-never-existed.html <comment><USER2> Having attended a 2004 lecture in which Jack Horner told us that dinosaurs were probably all covered in feathers I find that all and any new dinosaur discoveries must be taken with a grain of salt. Though scientists have been studying dinosaurs for 100 years or so, it seems increasingly likely they've barely scratched the surface of really knowing what that era was like.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a comment at the end of the video, something along the lines of:

      Our old image of dinosaurs as ruthless killing machines
      may be wrong, [...] some of them were caring parents,
      with teenagers and younger offspring; they may have lived
      in herds; they could have been highly social.

That makes sense to me. There are evolutionary advantages to being social and sociability occurred in mammals in a relatively short time after the extinction of the dinosaurs. It would be pretty amazing if, in all the time the dinosaurs had, they never evolved to be social. Don't you think?

<comment><USER4> I've never seen a social lizard, and they've had 65 million years longer to evolve than dinosaurs.

<comment><USER5> Just yesterday, I was watching a pack of Komodo Dragons ... well, eat the corpse of some mammal. It was a video - I didn't see it in real life. But the point is: they weren't eating each other.

<comment><USER6> Well the adults are cannnibalistic, known to eat the young ones.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know ALL carnivorous snakes and lizards are potentially cannabalistic, that's why herpetologists have to be extremely careful not to keep different sized snakes or lizards together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just a good example of how hard it is to tell what things are like based on remains rather than actually being there.

<comment><USER9> It's a good example if it's right.

<comment><USER10> But if it is wrong they it would also be a good example, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The proper definition of a species is that individuals can interbreed and have fertile offspring. It's impossible to test whether two fossils are the same species. The usual assumption is that if they look different they were different species, but that can be wrong for many reasons. Dogs, for example, are all one species, but you might well classify Chihuahuas and Labradors separately based on their remains

<comment><USER12> I think your definition is a bit off. If I recall correctly, a species is a group that _does_ interbreed naturally and produce fertile offspring, not just can.

<comment><USER11> For full discussion, including various proposed definitions and the problems of identifying species from fossils, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a fairly common problem in taxonomy, where to draw the line between species and subspecies. That is why you will occasionally see mention of "lumpers" and "splitters", those who include everything possible into one species, and those who break things up into multiple species rather than subspecies. (Lumpers and splitters also occur at higher levels of organization - genera, families, and even orders - in some classes and phyla.) Of course, in paleontology you also have the problem of different aged animals looking different and single oddities getting written up as species because of the extremely small sample size available.

</comment><comment><USER13> paleontology need to get help from CSI people :)

what they do currently is no more than a educated guess, this might also apply to evolution theory in general, until we have a time machine there is no way we can prove they are/were right.</comment>


Saudi-Russia oil war is a game theory masterstroke - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/1da60fa2-3d63-439e-abd4-1391a2047972 <comment><AUTHOR> Could someone clarify what is happening. Seems like the pivotal sentence in the article is:

>The sell-off will hurt producers all around but will bring Riyadh and Moscow longer-term benefits. With their low costs and vast financial reserves, the two can withstand a loss of oil revenue better than most producers.

In short: Russia and Saudi Arabia are using this shock to the global system to force the prices to plummet so as to make the competition fold up and leave. Right?

<comment><USER2> Right on. Main target are shale and sand oil production in North America, with have much higher extraction costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does somebody have a link that is not behind a paywall?

Tried with archive.org and/or incognito without success.</comment>


The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments - <AUTHOR> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

<comment><USER2> This is reassuring.

It's great to know that there really isnt an agreed upon definition for a 'Wallet'.

The payments space is under rapid transformation and a body of individuals like this can only benefit the space.</comment>


Keyboard shortcut - <AUTHOR>

Hi. I was wondering how I can implement keyboard shortcuts like the ones at rememberthemilk.com on my website. It's so convenient, and I want to be able to do the same thing on my own website. Has there been any artcle that talks about the technique? Maybe any jQuery plug-in?<p>Please let me know. Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Here is an example in: <http://www.devx.com/webdev/10MinuteSolution/27134/0/page/3>

Most likely, if you are using a JS library, they already have some easy tools to do this through the library. I use YUI, and here it is for that library: [http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/container/keylistene...](http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/container/keylistener.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great. Thank you so much.</comment></comment>


How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real <comment><USER2> I've been waiting for his upcoming novel "Agency" to come out for a long time! [https://www.amazon.com/Agency-William- Gibson/dp/110198693X](https://www.amazon.com/Agency-William- Gibson/dp/110198693X)

Excited to hear about this:

> "Agency" is a sequel to Gibson's previous novel, "The Peripheral," from > 2014, which is currently being adapted into a television show for Amazon, > executive-produced by the creators of "Westworld."

<comment><USER3> I thought The Peripheral was a really frustrating novel to read.

Many — perhaps most — of Gibson's novels have the main plot occur behind the scenes, with the principal character being a minor player a passive observer of events instigated by others, in particular by wealthy oligarchic figures with unlimited resources (think Armitage in Neuromancer, Bigend in the Blue Ant books, etc.). Think about what Case actually _does_ in Neuromancer. He steals the ROM containing Dixie Flatline, and then... not much else. I loved Neuromancer when I first read it in the 1990s, but today a re-read makes it painfully obvious how much of the plot is on rails, with the main group of characters transported from location to location, ticking boxes on the heist checklist.

The Peripheral is an _extreme_ example of this. Without spoiling anything serious, Flynne makes a pivotal conscious choice in the first chapter, and then for the rest of the book she does absolutely nothing other than being shipped around while other characters do stuff. She's even kidnapped at one point. The last two thirds of the book is spent mobilizing for a huge event that, at least to me, barely registers when it happens, and Flynne doesn't even seem necessary in order to resolve the central conflict, except that Gibson wanted her to be present. Flynne is not a badly drawn character, but she has very little agency.

I love Gibson's prose and his attention to world building and futuristic detail, which I think end up elevating his books above what the shoddy plots deserve, but even that seemed diminished in The Peripheral. The dialogue is particularly atrocious, with every present-day character speaking in the same annoying shorthand style. A _lot_ of The Peripheral consists of people talking on the phone with each other and repeating known plot points to each other. There's a lot of lazy writing here for someone famous for their cool-sounding prose.

<comment><USER4> It has been my observation that some people are really bothered by structural or technical problems in storytelling—and, conversely, highly value structurally and technically sound stories—and others don't seem to notice at all.

This doesn't seem to be a trade-off thing either—I find that few things actually are, just as "the truth lies somewhere in the middle" is more fairy tale than dependable guide—that is, those who appreciate technically-sound storytelling aren't somehow deficient in appreciation of humor or good characterization or well-written dialog or whatever. They are just very bothered by sloppy or poor plotting, while other people don't even notice. (presumably there are also some who notice but do not care, though I believe they're a rare species)

<comment><USER5> > _...some people are really bothered by structural or technical problems in > storytelling...and others don 't seem to notice at all._

Good point. I was just thinking this while reading reviews from people who loved/hated Haruki Murakami's _1Q84_. Some people focus on language/affect and others on plot/information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not super-relevant to the article, but I thought I would mention:

It often strikes me that the opening line of Neuromancer, which is something like "The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel" must be losing its meaning to newer readers.

<comment><USER7> A recently penned introduction to Neuromancer (by Gibson, I think, though it might be by Neil Gaiman) points this out, as well as Gibson's failure to predict cell phones (which he is chagrined by).

Just the other day I was reading some early Neal Stephenson, and it made reference to 32-bit personal computers as being on the cutting edge. I guess you could read it as a period piece. Similarly, a novel about a computer that was written in the 1950s describes a machine a city block on a side, cooled by Niagra falls, with 1000 bits of storage, that somehow still forms the pillar of a surveillance society.

Novel writers are not the best predictors of technology, it would appear. That's okay.

<comment><USER8> >with 1000 bits of storage

Did anybody really write that? The first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby (1948), had 1024 bits of storage. Even assuming no miniaturization, just scaling up contemporary computers would have gotten you more than 1000 bits.

<comment><USER7> I forget the name of the book, but yes, they really did write that. It wasn't a mainstream author, if that matters.

(It _might_ have been a megabit, but it sure wasn't much compared to what you need in order to run a computerized dystopia...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really enjoyed his most recent novel "Peripheral" and can't wait for his next one due out in January.

</comment><comment><USER10> > An orange notebook, filled with intricate time lines for "The Peripheral," > was decorated with a sticker bearing the logo of the niche techwear brand > Outlier—a black swan.

Outlier makes amazing clothing: [https://outlier.nyc](https://outlier.nyc)

<comment><USER11> $395 for a hoodie?? I quite like my made-in-America hoodie from American Giant, which retails for $108. What extra value would I get if I shelled out an additional $287 for the Outlier hoodie?

<comment><USER12> Check out the prices on Arc'teryx Veilance, also mentioned in the article. $2299 for a hoodie.

<comment><USER11> Insanity, sheer insanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While they are a nice read, I had the impression his stories didn't age well in terms of technology.

A fax machine in a car?

<comment><USER14> wait till eink is the thickness of a sheet of paper, and cellular modems and antennas fit as well. holding a piece of "paper" that can always reflect a current source of truth, or be etched and locked to never changed.

<comment> mewse-hn Orwell is spinning in his grave at the phrase "a current source of truth"

<comment><USER14> there are plenty of temporal truths relative to their frame. "hours worked this week" or "percent complete."

you might also be tracking a moving object, and as that object relocates geographically, different types of sensors pick it up, and the device saying "ive found it" changes. each sensor is the source of truth.

if those things were printed on standard paper, they can be false moments after they are printed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> awesome article. i really need to read his newer stuff( for me newer anyway)

</comment><comment><USER16> Avid sci-fi reader here. Gibson had maybe 3 good books in him. 30 years ago. Cyberpunk, although influential, was a short flash in the pan. Him and a few others (Rudy Rucker, etc) made some contributions.

There's far better out there and I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.

<comment><USER17> The world he created was all around you by the time you were born so you probably wouldn't understand.

<comment><USER18> Great point.

Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones. I even grew up before cell phones, but they are such a part of our lives now it is hard to look past when they are missing.

<comment><USER4> Modern cell phones are a hellish technology for people trying to plot stories. Every single person's carrying a superior version of a 1960s spy's kit, and can magically send anything recorded on it to anyone else in seconds. It takes serious effort to make any event or information plausibly known only to a limited circle, should any of them wish it to be otherwise.

It's become almost an in-joke how horror movies so often have to find a way to dispose of or disable cell phones early in the plot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Truth about Vaccines - <AUTHOR> https://unherd.com/2020/07/dont-dismiss-the-anti-vaxxers/ <comment><USER2> > as we already have during this pandemic in the case of facemasks, first > advising that they were useless and maybe even dangerous (which may or may > not have been a "noble lie" to preserve mask stocks for healthcare workers)

That "noble lie" has utterly crushed confidence in authorities everywhere. I hope that the long lasting fallout caused by the lie was worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Posting this now before finishing the article to be an early poster. (see edit below for my comments after finishing the article)

The article refers to missteps and errors doctors have made concerning vaccinations. One misstep/error that is concerning to me is the use of thimerosal as a preservative/adjuvant.

Around 1999, the FDA began to pressure manufacturers to remove thimerosal from all childhood vaccines due to safety concerns. The following link is a great summary why that presents pro/con perspectives. Thimerosal is no longer used in childhood vaccines, and has been largely replaced by aluminum-based adjuvants. [https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood- biologics/vaccines/thimer...](https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood- biologics/vaccines/thimerosal-vaccines-questions-and-answers)

In 2004, FDA official William Egan stated that no clinical trial had been done to evaluate the safety of thimerosal, a preservative/adjuvant that was commonly used in vaccinations. Except for a poorly run 1930 study. See the following link for the testimony. It's from an anti-vax youtube channel, but the testimony is real and uncut. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBRwOohhHuA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBRwOohhHuA)

A few years ago, after about 15 years of studying biochemistry and personal experimentation (including obtaining an environmental engineering degree), I identified the root cause of my crippling illness that took away my ability to walk. Chronic mercury toxicity. Thimerosal contains mercury. Maybe I got the mercury somewhere else, but I have no other known exposures. Never ate much fish, and my symptoms started long before I ever ate any.

I have reversed the course of my illness using a medication that specifically binds to mercury and facilitates easier excretion from the body. I've been using this therapy for 3 years now with consistent improvement. If it was a placebo effect it would not produce consistent results for such a long period of time.

For those curious, the medication I'm using is emeramide. It is currently going through the FDA approval process for the treatment of mercury toxicity, and looks like it will be approved within 10 years.

Edit:

After finishing the article I'd like to address two points:

(1) I see that the author discussed the FDA's removal of thimerosal. They point out how experts "talked out of both sides of their mouths", claiming thimerosal was safe, but insisted it be removed as expeditiously as possible. Toxicity is very very complex science. During my 4 years as an environmental engineer I noticed a huge amount of politicking around toxicity issues because it's so hard to prove if some compound is safe or not. My interpretation of the expert's behavior regarding thimerosal is that they became so uncomfortable with the unproven safety profile of the compound that they pushed for it's removal, while simultaneously saying it was fine in order to cover their asses. It's career suicide to admit you supported the use of a compound all the while insisting it was safe, only to flip-flop and say it was dangerous all along. So the experts do the right thing, banning the compound, while covering their asses. I saw this phenomenon over and over while working in pollution remediation.

(2) The author spends considerable time discrediting Wakefield's MMR study. MMR never contained thimerosal, so discussion of that study with respect to thimerosal's safety is not applicable. Also, Wakefield's study was ONE study, and it's so strange how the pro-vax movement keeps talking about how terrible it was like it is still relevant. There have been hundreds if not thousands of other studies much more worthy of discussion. The healthcare industry has published numerous fraudulent studies from all sorts of perspectives. It's not a phenomenon only associated with people who question vaccine safety. See Merck's fraudulent study demonstrating Vioxx's safety. They just removed 3 participants so the numbers looked good.

<comment><USER4> I think Vioxx is a great case study in why people are growing skeptical of not just vaccines, but pharma solutions to daily problems in general.

I find it hard to be too critical with people who are skeptical of modern medical science, given we know the Replication Crisis [0] has yet to be resolved. Between the human brain's chronic inability to parse statistics properly and the incredible amount of money to be made in solutions that make chronic conditions or deadly diseases go away, I do my best to be tolerant.

Ironically, another post that's currently sitting on the HNews frontpage has some fun ads from the 60s encouraging women to slam sugar before lunch so they don't eat as much. I'm sure this advice was being peddled alongside physicians who not only smoked in their patient rooms, but encouraged smoking for it's weight loss side-effect.

Separating the human from science is unfathomably difficult. Humans are cruel, selfish and misguided about many things. Assuming because something was published in JAMA or NEJM by someone who spent 6 years in a PhD program at an accredited university, that it's the gospel truth should be discouraged. People should ask questions and think for themselves. And as a result, some people will make horrible decisions and some may even die directly from those decisions or from the long term consequences. But then again, there were probably plenty of doctors in the 60s who had a gut feeling about the safety of smoking and ended up dying of some horrible and preventable cancer. But what the hell, they had a medical degree, so they probably knew better than everyone else.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)

Edited to add missing link

<comment><USER3> One big issue that gets lost in the discussion is how many of these treatments are reasonably safe for perfectly healthy people, and it's the people with risk factors who need to be concerned. That's why informed consent and choice are so important.

Maybe Vioxx was fine for most, and the decrease in digestive symptoms made it the ideal medication for many. Maybe doctors could have withheld prescriptions for people at risk of heart attack. Maybe a big warning could have been placed on every bottle so patients could decide for themselves. But instead it blew up into a drama-fest because one side has to be 100% correct and the other crazy or fraudsters.

If this either/or dynamic was addressed we could come close to having our cake and eating it too.

But instead everyone is shoe horned into limited studies, and those less-than- healthy people on the fringes are demonized and ostracized as luddites destroying human civilization. Except every once in a while when big pharma gets the blame for pushing safety risks too far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun fact: You cannot get emergency FDA approval for a vaccine (Remdesivir) if another effective drug exists (HCQ).

<comment><USER6> Firstly, Remdesivir isn't a vaccine. Second, there is no magic cure. I just took another look at controlled trials of OH-Chloroquine and the latest science says its effects on patient outcomes are small when they exist at all.

<comment><USER7> OP was taking the NYT method such as in this article about a possible vaccine:

>The goal is to prevent haphazard or inequitable distribution of a treatment or vaccine when there isn't enough to go around. Such a system has already been used in allocations of remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the coronavirus.

>"This is all very new," said Dr. Douglas White, an ethicist and vice chairman of the department of critical medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, which began using a weighted lottery last month to distribute remdesivir.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/health/coronavirus- vaccin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/health/coronavirus-vaccine- allocation.html)

It's quite easy to see how the jump to vaccine can be made when they really meant treatment.</comment></comment></comment>


Hologram Tupac Was Inevitable - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/hologram-tupac-was-inevitable/255990/ <comment><USER2> I don't know what to think of this article. It reads as if it was written by someone who may have heard of Tupac but definitely wasn't a fan. I can't say that a fan of hip hop music would consider Kurupt to just be the answer of a trivia question. If you are a hip hop fan Tupac's death is more along the lines of Bob Marley, not Elvis. People chose sides during that stupid time in hip hop but mostly everyone who was a real fan in that era respect both Biggies and Tupacs music now that all of the smoke has cleared.

While I agree that after death, Tupac image has been "manipulated", but it is the fans doing it more than anyone else. They remember their version of 2Pac and casually dismiss his life contradictions. 2Pac made a lot stupid decisions but also had moments of genius. He was the image of youth rebelliousness but too often crossed the cavern of casual disregard of others. That is a thin line and at times he walked it poorly. And now that I am ten years older than when he died I can see why. At 25 years old you do a lot of dumb shit.

I think a lot of fans reacted as they did to that hologram because 2Pac has never really had a proper public memorial. Biggie had the big MTV awards spectacle with Puff, a gospel chorus, and Sting. He had big budget movies made of his life, tribute albums and a whole host of other tributes. Basically a lot of chances for his fan to mourn his passing while also celebrating his life. 2Pac has had a couple of tribute albums and a few really low budget documentaries. Nowhere near even especially considering how even they were in stature in both the hip hop and the music community as a whole.

Even though I was aware of the tech behind the "hologram" and hated a lot of what 2Pac became towards the end of his life I was still amped up and moved by the show. I wouldn't want to see it again because then I would feel his image really was being exploited. But as a DJ and fan of hip hop for about 29 years, I was glad to see it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we stop saying "hologram"? It was no more a hologram than a movie shown at a theater is a hologram. The word "Hologram" has a very specific meaning; this isn't it.

It's exceedingly silly that people are freaking out about this, Elvis impersonators have been a cultural cliche for decades and I'm sure there are Tupac impersonators.

</comment><comment><USER4> Being relatively young, I don't know if what I am going to describe is new or not.

I am under the impression that the advent of a globalized internet culture has fostered the nostalgic phenomenon. If you are a regular reader of any social websites where people can publish content you can see the extent of this among people from "Generation Y": clothes, old games ( Prince of Persia on Apple 2 anyone ?), actors, movies, music, etc... It doesn't even have to be good, it will be put on a pedestal anyway.

What enables us today is that these old things which use to be forgotten by previous generations can now be accessed at will: old videos are put on Youtube, old pictures are backed up everywhere, memories are slowly becoming immortal.

I am absolutely not a nostalgic person myself so I don't feel the impulsive to think about oldies but I think it's a very interesting thing to analyze, maybe it's even a bit worrying: Could these fond memories hold us back?

<comment><USER5> In the 90s, tho', everyone looked to the future. Some anecdata, all my friends were cybergoths back then. Now they wish they lived in the '30s... The 1930s. It's a cliche, but it was 911 that turned the world from a certain to an uncertain place. Now people are hankering for simpler times.

<comment><USER6> > It's a cliche, but it was 911 that turned the world from a certain to an > uncertain place. Now people are hankering for simpler times.

I have to call you out on this. What the heck are you talking about?

<comment><USER5> The Cold War had ended, the "new economy" was in full swing, the future looked golden. Historians like Francis Fukushima called it "the end of history". Then the world was plunged back into social, economic and geopolitical uncertainty. People look to the past for comfort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought that article was pretty ridiculous.

"Hologram Tupac is an inheritance of arena-rock one-upsmanship, the latest step in rap's forced march on Spinal Tap-ism."

This, to me, just screams that this writer knows nothing of rap/hip-hop and it's current trends. Sure, people who don't actually pay attention to the music may see it that way because of artists and performances like Kanye and Jay-Z's "Watch The Throne" tour but currently hip-hop is coming back to the point it was at in the mid-90s, with thought-provoking poetry on one side and money/cars/girls anthems on the other.

"Over the past 16 years, a lot of Tupac's music has been gradually sullied by all that's followed. "Dear Mama" is held up to make him a sensitive feminist, which he wasn't, while "Hit 'Em Up" is held up to make him a hyper-violent gangsta, which he wasn't either. "

What does this writer know of Tupac's actual life or his reasons for writing and performing those songs? Hip-Hop is a way to express not only one's own opinions, but also the viewpoints and stories of others that we wouldn't normally see in our lives.

I understand where the article is coming from but it seems like a lot of over- analysing. It seems unnecessary and a grab at a few reads just because this whole "hologram" is currently trending. Hip-Hop is and will always be a large part of my life and I just don't think this guy really gets it, just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER8> I saw a hologram of will.i.am at DLD in Munich alongside Cheryl Cole roughly 3 years ago. I don't see what the fanfare is about? It seems like _we_ have just discovered it, but its by no means nothing new.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. Here's a 2009 video presenting the same technology:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSICZ_7hpho>

<comment><USER10> Richard Branson from 2006: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HicaK7NTHQI>

Edit: I also remember the pinball game "Revenge from Mars" from 1999. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA7Cgzk-y1U>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Japan has a fully virtual pop star that does "live" performances as a hologram (although this was never a real person so it's somewhat different):

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/18/hatsune- mik...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/18/hatsune-miku-japan-s- hologram-pop-idol.html)

I think it's interesting to see this as a technology and it has cool uses (like above I suppose), but are we, as a society, prepared for something that takes this to the next level?

I'm thinking something like "The Nirvana 2015 Reunion Tour" with a holographic CGI Kurt Cobain.. I'm not sure that would be as well received..

</comment><comment><USER12> _In 1981, Rolling Stone famously slapped a photo of Jim Morrison on its cover to go with the headline: "He's Hot, He's Sexy and He's Dead."_

Digital recreations of the dead have been with us for awhile. And art of this nature has been around for much of human history. I wonder how different this will be from the Renaissance technology of painting? Perhaps the difference will be that, with the help of computer technology, such recreations will be able to pass the Turing Test, at first in limited contexts, then more generally.

I think digital Tupac fell into an Uncanny Valley of a different sort. His appearance was almost flawless, but the context was still unsettling to many of the audience. I wonder how long it will be before we have the first "Digital Resurrection" cult?

How about a novel where a terminally ill iconic business leader and entrepreneur, instead of faking his death, fakes his continued life? Everyone just assumes that he's never seen mingling with the public because he's gotten Howard Hughes eccentric in his infirmity. By the time humanoid robots are ready for him to "meet" people and shake hands, his age and frailty make it easier for the technology to pull off the performance.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like the way this article is written, but it's really too easy to say something is "inevitable" _after_ it's happened.

</comment><comment><USER14> So does this mean Hologram Jobs is inevitable at WWDC?</comment>


Magway – packages and goods transport using magnetic levitation - <AUTHOR> https://www.magway.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: \- UK based

\- Prototype and testing done

\- Aiming to build the infra and sell capacity to transportation companies.

\- Seeking investment. ( Embargo on recent investment decision by UK government, pending crowd funding completion?)

\- informative videos that show how the transportation would work</comment>


Instagram influencer engagement hovers near all-time lows - <AUTHOR> https://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/instagram-influencer-engagement-hovers-near-all-time-lows-study-says/558331/ <comment><USER2> As with any data study, it always helps to read the fine print. This is how they measure engagement rate: "The firm measures engagement with a like follower ratio or the average number of likes on each Instagram post compared to the number of followers."

Thus engagement rate could be decreasing, but that doesn't say anything about the _total average engagement_ of Instagram posts, which might be increasing. Possible reasons engagement rate is decreasing (but overall engagement rising):

1) The people who followed your brand in the early stages are your most enthusiastic fans and most likely to engage with your posts. Followers that hop on the bandwagon are less likely to engage, thus lowering your engagement rate. In effect, over time, your follower count will increase, but new followers will increase the denominator (number of followers) but won't increase the numerator (engagement).

2) Perhaps, there's been a rise in automated followers. Thus, your follower count has been increasing but most of it are bots, thus your engagement rate is decreasing.

3) Perhaps Instagram might be pushing more people to follow brands they don't want to engage with. Whether it's through algorithmic recommendations, or more ads that tell you to follow a brand.

<comment><USER3> What drives people to like a commercial instagram post in the first place?

If it's my cousin with a fish, of course I'll like the photo. That's me saying, "I saw that fish, good work, keep it up," and my cousin takes my like the same way.

If it's a big account, what's the point of being like #14532143, or even upvoting top page reddit/hn posts for that matter? Is it just cathartic or something? I don't get the point.

<comment><USER4> It's possibly the same reason people wear clothing with a large brand-name printed across the back/front. People often associate brands with their "tribe", and liking posts could be another way to signal that they are part of the in-group.

Disclaimer: I possibly don't know what I am talking about as I don't really know Instagram mechanics at all, but I am guessing they are similar to Facebook's.

<comment><USER5> Does Instagram broadcast a notification to your friends / followers when you like something? I don't use it, but I think it'd need something like that for a signaling theory to make sense.

<comment><USER6> There is no broadcast, but when you are scrolling your feed you will see a selection of friends who have liked each post.

Also if you view the activity feed (in a different corner of the app) you can see what your friends have been up to. This is where you will see more explicitly "Sally, Sue, John and Dave liked a post by Mr. Famous" (and similar activity).

<comment><USER7> > There is no broadcast,

Wrong.

In your notifications screen (who liked your stuff), you can change pane and instead see what your friends has liked.

Most people don't know it, but yes, it means you can "spy" on your spouse or vica-verce.

It's the sort of creepy most people wanted to avoid when they left Facebook, and unknown to them, Instagram still has it.

<comment><USER8> The "likes/comment" notification is still chronological. And if you follow around more than 300 accounts, then it's quite difficult to spy. But if you follow only selected few people(say <50), then yes, it is much easier to spy.

<comment><USER7> I'm getting downvoted and I'm not sure why. In case anyone misunderstood my comment, I didn't encourage people to spy.

My comment was merely meant as a correction to an incorrect claim and making people aware that they can be spied upon, also on Instagram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My wife has about 10k followers and over the past month or so total engagement (number of likes and follows) has dropped considerably, and most of the time her photos don't show up in any hashtags. Her "impressioned" engagement rate (percentage of people that saw the post that then liked or commented) hasn't really changed noticeably.

Instagram just shows her photos to fewer people (and often never shows them to anyone but existing followers - no considerable Explore or Hashtag views).

I've clicked around many "influencers" photos recently and followed their hashtags and often their photos don't show there. Fun anecdote: the less clothes the person (man or woman) is wearing the less likely the photo is to appear in the hashtag feed.

My conspiracy theory: Instagram is favoring personal relationship and smaller accounts, or maybe trying to encourage small accounts to become "addicted to engagement" in order to pull more wannabe influencers into the platform.

None of my findings are by any means thoroughly researched or done in a scientific manner. Just casual and curious browsing.

I'm curious if anyone else has seen any odd hashtag behavior lately. It's possible Instagram just tailors my version of a hashtag's "Recent" feed to me.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you need any conspiracy theory to explain anything. The 'influencer market is becoming saturated. With low barriers of entry, you have millions of people joining and trying to squeeze out every penny of value.

This is the end result of 'perfect competition' or 'long tail' \- depending on what your dance is.

<comment><USER11> How would that explain not showing up in search results for keywords in the post?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I operate a larger instagram account (125k followers), and while I would rather die than apply the word "influencer" to it, I can confirm that it's very unlikely that this has to do with the content of the feeds. We have extremely regular content: 2 posts per day of artworks currently on view around the world. Sometimes we add thousands of followers a week, and our posts rack up tons of likes. Sometimes it takes weeks to add a thousand followers. There's no change in the number of people mentioning us, no outside source for the influxes. It really feels like we hit some threshold in the algorithm and then everything changes for a while. We've been pinned at 125k for a few weeks now after a period of fast growth. Nothing about our content or our natural audience has changed.

<comment><USER13> I've got a smaller account(33k) and have noticed similar issues lately. It makes no sense as to why visibility fluctuates when my behavior hasn't changed. I have a feeling it's Instagram trying to push us to use their ad system.

<comment><USER12> This is my fear too. Instagram's addictive neuroengineering has crowded out attention to our website, so it's a platform where we need to be in order to reach our constituency. But we are a tiny non-profit and can't afford to pay to play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do influencers really...influence? It seems like a lot of money is thrown at some of these folks but it's not clear that is directly leading to sales.

<comment><USER15> Surprisingly, people follow attractive people because they want to see photos of attractive people and not because they wonder what tea they drink

<comment><USER16> I watch the Super Bowl for the (american) football, but the TV commercials are still effective. Much of advertising is just reminder that the product exists. Effective not because I buy what Tom Brady buys. "Influencers" are just "content providers" to get the views.

<comment><USER17> > Effective not because I buy what Tom Brady buys

Meaning ceramic underwear?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good. Anything to destroy the navel-gazing ego-stroking that has come to characterize online life

</comment><comment><USER19> tangentially i can't stomach that word, "Influencer"

<comment><USER20> I feel that it is more than just the terminology. It is also their ideology. It doesn't matter what they are called it will still elicit a negative reaction from me.

<comment><USER21> I am interested in this phenomenon of hating influencers. Do you feel the same way about this same phenomenon with athletes / other celebrities? Wheaties has been doing influencer marketing since 1934 [1]. Does the fact that pretty much every successful athlete makes most of their money from influencer marketing illicit a negative reaction from you as well? If so, then you can stop reading.

If not, do you mind explaining why it's different? Also, what do you mean by "their ideology"?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_on_Wheaties_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_on_Wheaties_boxes)

<comment><USER19> guys, the word is elicit

To your point, i think there is no comparison. Famous athletes/artists have earned the public's trust due to being very talented and working hard. I don't think most social media promoters have earned the same kind of recognition and thus trust, especially when it is obvious from the get-go that they are going after monetization ASAP, they are not in it for the fun of it. It's not equally inspiring

<comment><USER22> It's not accurate to say influencers don't work very hard. Some of them are also genuinely talented. It's just that they're talented at and work hard at something people here don't value: popularity. The illusion that popularity is just a byproduct of important work matters to the credibility of being famous. Influencers just throw that away.

When I asked my sister why she just called a girl at her school "famous" she said because she has 100k+ followers. So she is famous for being famous.

<comment><USER19> > It's just that they're talented at and work hard at something people here > don't value: popularity.

Rightly so. It is easy to gain popularity by appealing to people's lower insticts or by being ridiculous. Maybe the top 10 "famous for being famous" persons really did put extraordinary effort , but i think it's much less true for everyone else, otherwise they would be famous for something else. And even if it is true, it's not the kind of work that ppl value a lot. It's one thing to be famous as a Kardashian, another to be famous as Maria Callas or Madonna

<comment><USER22> As devil's advocate, think of how many women have sex tapes out there, and think of how many of them built a billion dollar empire on it. What is being one more pop star in comparison?

There are types of great effort which produce zero value and are only judged subjectively. I really respect the guy putting Doom on his microwave, but to most people that is a completely pointless exercise. I suspect popularity is like that. I laugh at the girls taking 400 selfies standing in front of a bridge, to post just one on Instagram, but I can't deny there is some effort and skill going on there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've ran this joke before but it's true...

Watch TV, get 5 ads every 5 minutes.

Watch Instagram, get 1 ad every 15 seconds...

</comment><comment><USER24> If you want to know how the influencer culture works and how they portray a photoshopped lifestyle, watch the Fyre Festival documentary.

<comment><USER25> There are quite a number of documentaries made by YT'ers, too, IMHO, the one with the most "lulz" is definitely this one by the "Internet Historian":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBPg5ftCMv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBPg5ftCMv8)

<comment><USER24> That was gold, thanks for sharing

<comment><USER25> Sorry for stalking, but so was your very first submission! It's probably standard reading here on YCombinator, but it was my first of Paul Graham's essay on "Why Nerds are Unpopular", and it just speaks to me on so many levels...

Considering the main topic is about influencers, and that their "currency" is popularity, it's not even that off-topic to repost it here: [http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Personal plug, I'm exploring a "microinfluencer" (1k-1000k followers) management platform, initially focused on the fashion industry in NYC. This article is somewhat encouraging, actually.

Per HN's policy of commenting substantively, I will say these influencer deals are amateurish and lacking paperwork.

Currently an engineer at Big4, and exploring the seed/angel investment landscape. I'd love to get in touch to get advice and pick your brain on how to do further market research.

<comment><USER27> > I'm exploring a "microinfluencer" (1k-1000k followers) management platform, > initially focused on the fashion industry in NYC.

So a management company that recruits hopeful influencers and skims the top of their take-home pay? No, thanks.

I'm sure plenty will be fine on their own.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it would skin the top off their take-home Venmo payments that is currently lacking in legal paperwork.

In addition, they wouldn't have to orchestrate these deals over direct message and email exchanges.

This criticism is akin to saying Stripe or Visa or any broker platform not adding value. It's a fallacy of smaller pie slice in a larger pie. These are economic activities not being pursued because of barriers to entry for brands, and the overhead of orchestrating many smaller influencers versus 1 legitimate big contract with a more established influencer.

And yes, they would get 30% less, because they have to pay taxes now.

<comment><USER28> Exactly what legal paperwork does some tool who does stupid yoga poses with a free t-shirt need?

<comment><USER26> I lived in Seattle for half my life, and I see where this question stems from.

It's unbelievable to people in the Northwest that people in NYC, London, and other fashion hubs spend $1K on an article of clothing. This is the norm, not the exception here. Brands like Supreme barely want to sell their $600 t-shirt to paying customers, much less give them away.

Point being, it's a strawman to compare the target demographic of free tech swag to up-and-coming models getting free designer clothing. Still, it seems the fashion industry is adverse to paperwork and the formality. They'd love it if they didn't have to deal with paperwork, and can get a tax incentive to give out more (which can potentially be abused, but that's a separate discussion).

<comment><USER28> > it's a strawman to compare the target demographic of free tech swag to up- > and-coming models getting free designer clothing

Au contraire! I was actually specifically referring to some jokingly overpriced Balenciaga or Supreme shirt, almost certainly purchased by someone who is somehow shocked (shocked!) that they can't afford rent.

EDIT: Ah I see the confusion. When I said "free t-shirt," I meant, "t-shirt given to the influencer to promote for free," not "free tech t-shirt usually worn to a gym."

<comment><USER26> Sure. But the Balenciaga or Supreme shirt is a good point. This in some ways supports the hypothesis that people buy brands based on social influence. Value on the West Coast tend to coincide with utility, but this isn't the case with these fashion brands. Balenciaga revenue broke over a billion in revenue, and Supreme has been rumored to be a unicorn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well Instagram let the boat sale away.

Where was the ability to directly link a product you are promoting in your post? How many times have you seen people say, link is in my profile?

They could be facilitating the sale of promoted products directly and offer brands and individuals services to make it easy to go from click to sale. Additionally make sure people stay on the correct side of the law and disclosing that they are being paid. Maybe even require such payments to go via Instagram.

<comment><USER30> This exists. Product tagging is available to influencers, and Shopping rolled out earlier this year (and you can pay via IG).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Key: > The engagement rate for Instagram influencers with at least 10,000 followers is steady at about 3.6% worldwide. Influencers with 5,000 to 10,000 followers have an engagement rate of 6.3% and those with a following of 1,000 to 5,000 have the highest rate at 8.8%, per InfluencerDB.

This makes it pretty obvious that the growth of influencers is concentrated in the long tail, where engagement is lower and sponsored posts less valuable.

</comment><comment><USER31> > The engagement rate for sponsored posts fell to 2.4% in Q1 2019 from 4% > three years earlier, while the rate for non-sponsored posts slid to 1.9% > from 4.5% for the comparable periods.

So their sponsored posts get _more_ engagement than non-sponsored posts? Does that mean people basically follow them for their product placements?

<comment><USER32> More like the sponsored posts are better, more engaging content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does this surprise anyone? Traffic doesn't not equal conversion, it never did.

If you need to call yourself an influencer, you are unlikely one. Instagram's policies to market itself don't change facts.

Marketers used to pride themselves being hidden persuaders.

<comment><USER32> The marketers using influencers are still hidden.

An influencer is just an extremely cheap actor. Tom Cruise costs $20 million to get for this commercial, and 1,000 influencers costs only $1 million.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone ELI5 what an influencer is? I've seen the term used quite often but never looked into it.

Is it basically an instagram user with lots of followers that posts sponsored pictures or is there more to it than that?

<comment><USER35> My understanding: A person who has many followers who will like and buy whatever the influencer likes.

<comment><USER36> You've described both the influencer and the influenced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article doesn't address the power law of influencers. Audiences are engaging with a smaller number of super mega influencers such as the Bucket List Family (1.8M followers).

</comment><comment><USER38> What is "engagement" here? Is it something that is coupled to actual sales, or just likes/reposts?

</comment><comment><USER39> it's clear that influencers make a lot of money on IG but IG doesn't get a cut

<comment><USER40> I actually don't think it's clear at all that IG influencers make money at all. I imagine that it's similar to Twitch or Youtube - you have a very small 0.1% minority at the top making most of the income and everyone else scrapes by.

<comment><USER41> I think a lot of the lower-tier influencers look at influencing as a source of freebies rather than an actual job. They don't make much of an income, but they're perfectly happy just with the free things they're given to promote.

<comment><USER42> Not Instagram, but I know someone who is a food scene/restaurant blogger on the side. She likes going it (and does a good job). She gets some trips and probably money/benefits here and there but it's definitely more of a hobby with some perks than what a lot of people here think of as a side-gig much less a significant employment stream.

I know someone else who does hiking equipment reviews who I expect is in a somewhat similar boat.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using a Proof Assistant to Teach Programming Language Foundations (2010) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/6615365 <comment><USER2> Wow, nice to see readable math proofs that "run themselves", e.g. they define (a unary representation of) natural numbers as follows:

          Inductive nat : Type :=
            | O : nat
            | S : nat → nat.

S = successor

Then they define 'plus' as

          Fixpoint plus (n : nat) (m : nat) : nat :=
            match n with
              | O ⇒ m
              | S n' ⇒ S (plus n' m)
            end.

Adding three to two now gives five, as we'd expect:

        Compute (plus 3 2).
        The simplification that Coq performs to reach this conclusion can be visualized as follows:
        (*  plus (S (S (S O))) (S (S O))
        ==> S (plus (S (S O)) (S (S O)))
              by the second clause of the match
        ==> S (S (plus (S O) (S (S O))))
              by the second clause of the match
        ==> S (S (S (plus O (S (S O)))))
              by the second clause of the match
        ==> S (S (S (S (S O))))
              by the first clause of the match
        *)

via [https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf- current/Basics....](https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf- current/Basics.html#lab27)</comment>


The Secret Rules For Getting Hired - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/04/the-secret-rules-for-getting-hired/ <comment><USER2> These "rules" miss the big picture. People react in certain ways for entirely different reasons.

Example: Recruiter mispronounces my name. I don't say anything. This can be because:

1) I'm a coward. 2) I don't care. 3) I care and am not a coward, but think it would be petty to interrupt the conversation to point this out. 4) I'm overly practical and don't care about this kind of details. 5) I think the other person may feel bad if I correct them. 6) I accept that people make sometimes mistakes. Maybe I'll point it out if they do it 3 times or more. Etc.

Which is it? You'd have to know the person better to know.

Even if the person is just a coward, this could be based on specific traumatic experiences other persons didn't have and which affect only minimally the rest of the personality.

Same applies to thank you emails, coming late to the interview etc. With such subtle situations, you need to know _why_ somebody act the way they did, and without knowing the person, which you usually don't, when interviewing, you just can't.

These are just BS rules with which recruiters try to make their work easier. Similar to Codility & co. tests for software developers. Well, bad news, recruiting is hard. You'll have to take the time to listen to and think about your candidates.

<comment><USER3> Agree.

People often 'mispronounce' my first name (can't even pronounce last name). Honestly, I don't care. I don't blame them because they pronounce it from English point of view which is obvious as they are native speakers.

Some people ask me how would I say my name (I am Russian, but live in NZ), I tell them. Some people then try to say it that way, sometimes they 'forget' and fallback to English pronunciation. What's the big deal?

I can't even imagine myself being offeneded by that (Is author a child or what?). Same goes the other way: NZ is a diverse country, we have people from all around the globe here, and I bet I mispronounce every second name/last name.

<comment><USER4> > I can't even imagine myself being offeneded by that (Is author a child or > what?).

"Offended" as in perceiving the speaker to be giving offense; that is, perceiving the speaker to be intentionally not respecting the listener. Being able to pick up on that is quite adult, and the exact opposite of childish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >"If someone doesn't send a thank you email, don't hire them".

I recently went through a short job search for programming work in Austin. I made it all the way to the final, on-site interview at three places before landing an offer.

Every time I did not get an offer, I would get an email saying "thank you so much for your time, please reply with your concerns or questions!"

And so, each time, I sent and email asking "what did I do wrong, and what could I improve?" making it very clear I was just looking for a quick, single sentence answer like "more github projects" or "you smell."

I didn't get a single reply. Not one.

After that, I quit playing the ultra polite send-a-thank-you for every single phone call or meeting I was graced with, and sure enough, I got a couple job offers after that.

If anything, the whole experience convinced me that no one maybe outside of sales or filling an executive position really cares about this kind of business etiquette - either in giving it or receiving it.

<comment><USER6> _After that, I quit playing the ultra polite send-a-thank-you for every single phone call or meeting I was graced with, and sure enough, I got a couple job offers after that._

I wouldn't be surprised if deciding not to worry about details with unknowable significance and inconsistent response allowed you to relax a bit more in future interviews.

<comment><USER7> Same trick worked for young me when I started dating...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At my last job, my manager "tricked" me during the interview. Apparently, he wanted to see how I dealt with criticism. At least that is how the recruiter justified it when I expressed my dissatisfaction with the experience and my hesitation about working for that person.

That manager ended up being all about power trips and it made for a very toxic culture in his team and in interactions with others outside of the team. I left after less than a year despite not having a job lined up.

The only bright side is having found a position at a place that is the complete opposite.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are very few rules in getting hired. A few are:

1\. First class people hire first class people.

2\. Second class people hire third class people.

3\. People like to hire people similar to themselves.

4\. Not getting a job does not really say anything about you, but the guy they hired says a lot about the company.

PS:

5\. Most companies, when offered unexperienced talent and an experienced idiot, will hire the experienced idiot. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and he had the experience on his resume.

<comment><USER10> 6\. People overestimate which category they fall in and everyone thinks they're an "A player."

<comment><USER11> It goes both ways: people may feel they have to say that in public, but impostor syndrome is also a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From what I've seen and experienced most people doing the hiring are clueless. What's worse is most of them are insane. That is, they keep doing the same but expect different results.

Personally, I still shocked - and am mindful of the red flag - when they don't realize I'm interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me.

<comment><USER13> I'm a software engineer that's been involved in hiring decisions in the past.

When we make a bad hire we do a post-mortem just like we would for a critical production bug. We adjust the interview process or evaluation criteria every time a bad hire is made.

We also give the same interview for every role. We spend 80% of the time asking the same questions, and leave 20% of the time for the free flow conversation and interviewee questions.

<comment><USER14> Aren't you afraid that you focus too much on avoiding the bad ones, and not on trying to hire the top ones?

You cannot do a postmortem for failing to hire top talent, because you will never know.

What I want to say is that a bad hire is probably less important than missing out on a top candidate. Because you can always fire as soon as you find out. The other error cannot be corrected.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that there is no feedback for when we fail to hire top talent.

How would I know that during a round of interviews I failed to give an offer to Top Talent? What can I do if someone I think is Top Talent gets another offer we cannot match?

Sure, I can try my best to work against those very costly situations, but I never know how good someone is going to be until they are hired, so I don't have enough data to determine if I'm failing to hire the best.

I can, and we do, determine which candidates we hired that we really like and talk to them about why they choose the company and try to appeal to and find more candidates like them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is all expressions of power. It won't be overcome until interviewees get leverage and express it. By the structure of the thing they never get leverage, so it will continue because it can.

<comment><USER16> The leverage interviewers have is that they know if the candidate can't find a job, that at some point the candidate won't be able to afford rent/mortgage, food, clothing etc. That's a desperate position for a candidate to be in and it puts employers in a position of absolute power. With that type of game it's inevitable that you will see anti-social interview techniques. It would be a sign of high character if an interviewer didn't power trip over a candidate. The changes that would alter that dynamic is either that society should find it acceptable for people to live out of a tent and ask for donations from strangers or guarantee basic needs to all its members. Both of which are socially and politically untenable because it would disrupt the power structure of those well regarded and politically connected business that benefit. So I expect zero change on this issue in perpetuity.

<comment><USER17> The third option is a tight job market. This is undermined by mass immigration, criticism of which is fought by the establishment even harder than basic income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, the author (exec managing editor of Insider) of the "thank you email" blog post shared it on Twitter, and has received a large and largely negative response:

[https://twitter.com/jessicaliebman/status/111416052358150144...](https://twitter.com/jessicaliebman/status/1114160523581501440)

<comment><USER19> When the highest reply is a firm rebuttal from Scott Hanselman, you're probably on the wrong side of the argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I totally agree that these rules are absolute BS.

The goal of a job interview for me used to be twofold:

Can the candidate do the job?

Would I want to work with the candidate?

Unfortunately, I have got the second one wrong as often as not in the past, so now I just try to find anything that would mean that I wouldn't want to work with the candidate, in other words, are there any red flags?

If there aren't then that's good enough.

<comment><USER21> Could you share some typical red flags?

<comment><USER20> I can't say they are typical, but we've had two candidates become somewhat agitated when challenged about their experience, e.g. you said you were a developer for 2 years at company X but it seems that you mostly did support. This resulted in a tirade about job titles.

Another red flag for me is when candidates are asked about their level of expertise on a scale of 1 to 10 on a technology and they reply with anything above 7.

Statistically there are people that are going to be able to claim 8 or above out 10 on any technology, they just probably can command a higher salary that the company I work wishes to offer (we put salary ranges on our job ads), which means that they are exaggerating, can't judge their skills (either because of self delusion or because they just think the technology doesn't have that much more to offer) or worse lying.

The thing is we were asking this to be able to tailor the questions that we would ask. No point in asking somebody who says their skill level in sql is 2 about pivot tables.

<comment><USER22> The expertise scale level question is bogus. You'll get people with low expertise who believe their level is high because they think that's all there is to know about a technology (advanced beginners), while experienced people would rate themselves lower because they realize how much they don't know yet. And also there will be those who correctly estimate their level as average. Everybody's scale is different. You can't reliably distinguish those groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This type of thing is a red flag and allows you to weed out companies that would be bad places to work.

Of course its a problem if you are actually running low on money and need to find a job soon because that might tempt you to try to work there even though you can tell some of them may be jerks.

</comment><comment><USER24> While in general I agree, I understand the motivation behind these questions. Most jobs require more than just technical skills. They require and ability to think laterally, be independent, work on a team, etc. etc. Questions such as "tell me about a time when" are a reasonable way to assess some of these traits but also are not direct and have their own issues.

As long as interviews are consistent and polite I think it's reasonable to push candidates in non traditional ways to understand if they have the soft skills required for a role.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux _" A job interview isn't a set of trick questions"_

This reminds me of this old BBC comedy sketch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHy06FMsezI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHy06FMsezI)

<comment><USER25> John Cleese had a sketch in a similar vein [0].

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4iFzweRf3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4iFzweRf3E)

Eddit: Another comment beat me to it, but provided link for posterity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> And then you have the famous Liar's Poker interview question:

> Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you > were invited to Lehman's New York offices, your first interview might begin > with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty- > third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That was, > of course, the point. The interviewer just wanted to see whether your > inability to comply with his request led you to yank, pull, and sweat until > finally you melted into a puddle of foiled ambition. Or, as one sad > applicant was rumored to have done, threw a chair through the window.

<comment><USER27> Did he get the job?

<comment><USER14> Of course, he gets the job done no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Why would people want to work in such a homogeneous culture? Why would they > want to work for someone who couldn't even be bothered to search the web for > "How to pronounce Nguyen"?

Hilariously, I did a search for "How to pronounce $my_last_name" and each result I checked mispronounced it the same way English speakers always mispronounce it.

<comment><USER29> Yeah seriously. Almost every single American mispronounces my name even after I say it multiple times. Hell, they mispronounce common, one syllable American names like "Lou" more than half the time. When I tell them my name is like another name they can pronounce except without the "o" at the end, they still can't pronounce it despite being able to pronounce my name with an "o" at the end. After three decades of this, I've given up trying to correct people, trying to go with the Americanized pronunciation, or even using my full name at all. It's pointless. Americans are simply incapable of pronouncing anything even remotely foreign even if I enunciate it for them. I don't even bother with my last name. However they say it is fine because it's always wrong. I would recommend people adopt very simple American nicknames if they move here like many Chinese do, even if the name seems like it would be easy to pronounce. There's just no hope in getting people to pronounce your name right. Or accept the American wrong pronunciation and go with that. I've used all these strategies at some point in my life so now I have three names.

<comment><USER30> Germans pronouncing my American first name is the same way. It's a boring common Old Testament name. German has all the phonemes they need to say it too, even if the vowel is off a bit.

It's just something that happens, and I don't blame them for it after so long. I get the feeling that Anglicizing or Deutchifying names is universal.

<comment><USER29> British people usually have no problem with my name. I guess my issue is that people don't even make an effort. It's one thing to Americanize the name when you've never heard it pronounced correctly, it's another to continue pronouncing it that way after you've heard the correct pronunciation. But yeah, I've given up on this long ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The "thank you" emails seems to be a tradition/expectation of the classic corporate culture where the employer has a extreme amount of candidates for each opening and each candidate must please the interviewer at all cost. (e.g. a extreme imbalance in power between employer/candidate).

Quite contrary to the "startup" culture where there is a limited amount of candidates for each opening and where it's acknowledged that candidates might get multiple offers (e.g. a more balanced employer/candidate power)

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't want to work for someone that tries to trick me!

And if I had to hire a developer, I would want someone with great coding skills, not someone that makes a good impression at an interview.

<comment><USER33> Some people have great coding skills, but are right assholes or otherwise seriously toxic. You definitely need to look for more than just "great coding skills" if you want to hire great employees.

<comment><USER28> Sure, but I don't think "making a good impression in an interview" has a very strong correlation with whether someone is a "right asshole or otherwise seriously toxic." Plenty of decent people don't interview well, and plenty of assholes can put on 'interview face' to get a job.

<comment><USER34> Most assholes are thinly veiled in an interview. Decent people are nervous, and that's okay - it's usually pretty clear. Assholes are trying /hard/ not to come off as such, so when the interviewer inevitably challenges them on a piece of code or their background, they usually end up showing their true colors, at least in my experience.

<comment><USER35> That's funny because the last bit of feedback I received on an interview that was supposed to be a "preemptive yes" is that I was "a bit nervous" and they wanted to interview more candidates before making a decision. Sometimes you just can't win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > "The whole team thought you were great. You were probably the strongest > candidate overall, but we were looking for someone with experience in XYZ."

Wow, my GF just related this to me literally last week. She liked the team she interviewed with as well.

(I'm relieved actually as she got a job offer in hand for a place much closer to home).

<comment><USER37> I think sometimes the HR person just makes up a reason. It's counter- productive to read too much into it.

One time I was told I was great, but they needed someone with XYZ experience. It was very important.

They ended up hiring my friend, who had even less XYZ experience than I did.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, I could see the HR person just reaching the conclusion on their own that the candidate must not have XYZ since the team chose not to hire them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's almost not worth complaining about because of the ubiquitous of it, but I absolutely hate and make a point of never doing this if I'm interviewing someone:

1) Puzzle questions not related to the work they'd be doing. It's ok to have a somewhat puzzling geometry puzzle if they're doing, say, 3d work, but for a web dev? Etc. etc.

2) Coding on a white board. Can't you just setup a laptop in a conference room? Or have them bring in a laptop and show some of their work? Nobody ever codes on a white board!! Plus seeing them use a computer tells me way more. Can they type? That's important. I know some really good coders that can't type well, but it's more the exception than the rule. Do they know their tools well? Those things are all actually relevant to the work.

Also here's the other thing: there's essentially no cost or barrier to writing code (IE, you're not using up precious materials or something), so I don't understand why employers want to PROJECT how someone MIGHT write code via puzzles and white board writing when they can literally just pair up and watch the person solve an actual real world problem on an actual computer, with google and stack overflow like they'd actually have access to, and then they don't need to project _anything_ , because they know what it looks like when the person actually writes real world code! Spending a grand on a cheap laptop for this with a few software/IDE licenses is a lot cheaper than making a bad hire.

<comment><USER40> I write code on a whiteboard, when discussing how to solve a problem with colleagues. Almost exactly like in an interview. Do people really not do this?

<comment><USER39> I have literally never done this in a job outside of interviews, and I haven't had anyone else do it either. They might draw class diagrams or concepts, but writing code by hand is error prone and pretty pointless.

Regardless, most modern offices have a projector or a TV in conference rooms. I just don't understand why you'd use a white board when you can easily project a text editor. The problem with writing code in handwriting is you can't move it, so you have to do it all linearly. If you need to introduce a variable or a new scope it gets messy incredibly quickly. When I code I almost am never thinking linearly, and I'm constantly adding things above and below, and doing that on a white board is a NIGHTMARE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> One must learn that there are very few "rules" to anything in life. You must be skeptical that a person sharing their "rules" has a major experiential, interest driven ruleset they are trying to project onto every other domain.

</comment><comment><USER42> I flip a bird every time I read about this subject. How did we allow the hiring process get such bizarre when we are the scarce resource?

<comment><USER43> super trendy SF "hot" company with increasing investment.. word is that they are going through engineers left and right.. they do all the recruitment, get super-high octane output from the hires, and then dump them at the first error or problem.. no end of candidates for this company, is the second part, due to positioning and mission.. The ones that stay tend to be "pleasers" who will take this kind of treatment and perform.. rumors only ymmv

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What's this thing about the thank you emails? Thank who? When?

Do people send thank you emails after going to an interview but before they are offered/not offered the job? Or when is it? And why?

</comment><comment><USER45> > "When interviewing, I go for lunch with the candidate. I ask the waiter to > subtly get their order wrong. A great test of the interviewee's character!"

I'll silently pass such a company because I cannot stand working with psychopass.

> "We always leave candidates waiting half an hour before calling them in. How > do they cope with delays?"

That is a traditional technique for fraud. Getting them tired and lose the decision making ability. If not, the company are horrible at time-keeping. Not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm more than happy to send a thank you email... in response to one. Responding in kind is reasonable enough - social pleasantries exchanged between those who want them, skipped for the busy who would rather get down to business.

If that disqualifies me from some jobs, that's a feature. Uneven expectations here comes across as demanding respect while showing none, which speaks poorly of the work environment. Hard pass.

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't think that this sort of rant is useful.

In everyday life people understand that there are individuals they won't get on with. Not everyone is going to be your friend. You don't want to be everyone's friend (if you do, that's an ephemeral state that will likely bite you eventually).

When it comes to careers I often see expressed on here the attitude that somehow if the interview process were better; if the interviewer were different; etc; then it'd all be different, they'd get the job and live happily ever after.

Realistically? You'd end up working with a bunch of people who at best make questionable business decisions; at worst are completely opposed to your personality and make work a hellish place to be.

Maybe I'm missing something entirely and this is intended to be some bizarre sort of humour.

<comment><USER48> > When it comes to careers I often see expressed on here the attitude that > somehow if the interview process were better; if the interviewer were > different; etc; then it'd all be different, they'd get the job and live > happily ever after.

I agree that you shouldn't hire people who may not be the right fit and whom you have reason to believe may not succeed or thrive on your team. However, it seems apparent that most people (and I would include myself) may not really be good judges of that. There may be things that are "Red Flags" or "something's off" to us, simply because of the way we were brought up (cultural differences), the way we speak etc. I guess what I'm saying is that in an increasingly diverse world, the markers of success that we look for (or conversely the markers of failure) may not be accurate and we thus miss out on candidates who might actually be a great fit.

Personally, I used to judge interviewees pretty hard on the things I thought weren't appropriate, or things I considered unprofessional. But then I realized that isn't really my job as a technical interviewer. As long as the folks demonstrate the technical skills and a thirst for learning, that's good enough for me.

Which isn't to say there aren't red flags. Lying for instance; pathological liars will totally wreck your organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "The whole team thought you were great. You were probably the strongest > candidate overall, but we were looking for someone with experience in XYZ."

That happened to me. I suspect the experience requirement somehow changed during the interview process. So at the end of the multi-week interview process they realized they were looking for something different than what was listed on the position requirements. I'm not very upset about it. The time was wasted, sure. But I made some connections that may help later.

</comment><comment><USER49> I always send a thank you letter to anyone who interviews me. This includes the person from HR, their hiring manager, and anybody else who was in the room whose email I can get.

</comment><comment><USER50> It is definitely about attitude and if you can convey yourself from the perspective that they'd be lucky to have you, only serious issues needing fixing will do you in.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think one mistake from the author is the believe that somehow, an interview process is supposed to be fair.

It's not. Nature is not fair. School is not fair. Dating is not fair. And so on. We try to build fair societies, but right now, they are not.

And interview processes are really, really unfair. Being disappointed they are not and writing a rant about how to them more fair is very naive.

Interviews are most of the time social evaluations packed with negotiation. Very often, even the ones that pretend to be technical interviews.

Why ? Because humans are imperfect and limited. Most interviewers are just not capable of an effective recruitment process, no matter how they believe they are, not to mention a fair one.

So the advice to send here is not "make your recruitment process better". People that are able to will, and don't need this article to do so. People that can won't, and the article won't change their mind.

No, the advice is to the people looking for a job: don't take it personally, randomness takes big role in the process. But if you want to maximize your chances, you need to work on your social skills. Especially the ones that make them feel good about the interview, and value you.

You need technical skills to be good at your job. To be able to apply at high skill ones, to network with people with alike skills, to have fun, to negociate money.

But to nail the interview, you need more.

<comment><USER52> "Don't do that. A job interview is a structured process designed to let you consistently evaluate multiple candidates. If you are asking each candidate different questions, that's not a fair test."

if this is the thing you're responding to, you're misunderstanding the post entirely. "fair test" here is not about morals, it's about results. if i want to evaluate 2 candidates, i want the test to be as "fair" as possible _so that i have the most relevant, fine grained information as possible_. i want to render the candidates commensurable so i can make a better decision for my own purposes.

"life's not fair" in this context sounds like some kind of systems pessimism. it sounds like you're saying "stuff doesn't work." but of course it does. of course asking this question and not that question gives me more relevant hiring information. it's totally insane to think otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> There are lots of issues with traditional hiring approaches - would recommend looking into Performance-Based Hiring if you are a hiring manager looking to improve your process and outcomes

</comment><comment><USER54> At first I thought this article was for job seekers but actually it's for those hungering. These are some great tips for companies highering

</comment><comment><USER55> Maybe it's just me but I don't understand this article, it doesn't seem to be related to getting a job, seems more like some random musings on hiring?

As to saying thank you, that's not sycophantic, it's common courtesy. It's not that hard.

Anyway, what's with the hangup on names lately in the "tech" community? Every other podcast I listen to people keep excusing themselves for "mispronouncing" peoples' names. Newsflash: unless your name is English, people are guaranteed to mispronounce your name. You know they don't speak your language, so how could you expect them to pronounce your name in your language? I have never ever had a foreigner pronounce my name correctly in my language, and it doesn't bother me at all. I would be extremely surprised if they did, and my name is just outside of the comfort-zone of English orthography.

Could someone from the easily offended camp please explain your reasoning to me?

<comment><USER19> The polite thing to do, I think, is to _ask_ how to pronounce their name at the start of the conversation.

Or ask how they would prefer to be referred to. (Many of my asian relatives have an anglo pronounciation they'd be willing to offer).

<comment><USER55> Exactly, if you care about how people with other native languages pronounce your name, I feel that it's up to you to help them do that. Either by coming up with a more reasonable version of it or choosing some local name, like many Chinese do.

When I lived in China I certainly didn't expect anyone to even come close to pronouncing my name in proper Swedish. That would have been absurd. My name is Gustaf and that simply can't be rendered in Chinese, so how would they be able to do it, even if they wanted to? Most people at my school ended up calling me Difdif.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but if others are just bulldozing through a pronunciation, they haven't actually _given_ you the chance to help them with it.

When exchanging the usual pleasantries, it's often the interviewer who is the first one to attempt the name, not the interviewee.

If I were to answer my phone every time, "Hi, this Nguyen, my last name is pronounced pronounced S-- E--- O--- whatever", it would come off as a little odd. And possibly as annoyance or haughtiness on my part.

All this goes to show that the "rules of politeness", themselves, are part of the secret hiring process.

<comment><USER55> It would come off as odd because it IS odd. The normal thing is to expect foreigners to butcher your name and don't give it another thought. What does it actually matter?

And even if they ask, how would an interviewer be able to actually pronounce all these names? They would have to be polyglot geniuses.

Interviewer: So hello Mr Bezwzględny, how do you pronounce your name? Interviewee: Bezwzględny Interviewer in perfect Polish: Ok Mr Bezwzględny, can you tell me a bit about your background?

<comment><USER19> Just because it's expected, doesn't mean it reflects well on the butcher-er.

I can be polite enough to ask for a pronunciation (and apologize if I get it wrong).

When an interviewer doesn't even attempt that, it reflects poorly on their ability to view a candidate on their own worth.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why SpiderOak doesn't de-duplicate data across users - <AUTHOR> https://spideroak.com/blog/20100827150530-why-spideroak-doesnt-de-duplicate-data-across-users-and-why-it-should-worry-you-if-we-did

<comment><USER2> While that may be why SpiderOak does what they do, I disagree with most of their arguments?

First, you can do variable block-based de-duplication, which is how major storage vendors do it - not per-file, which doesn't really buy you much.

Leveraging this in the SAN firmware also prevents their ridiculous file transfer 'vulnerability' (which only exists due the way they wrote their software) - all of your files copy over the network to the storage system. Once they're on the storage system, at some later time and asynchronously, the storage system runs a dedupe on the blocks, and winnows down its storage. Think of it like transparently compressing on the storage side, only, hopefully, less intense on I/O.

Finally, they could simply encrypt everything and then they can't answer subpoenas about who has knowledge of what - it was all encrypted immediately after uploading, and no log is kept. If the data doesn't exist, you can't be forced to give it up...

<comment><USER3> IIRC, SpiderOak doesn't encrypt your files "immediately after uploading". Files are encrypted on the client side even before they're uploaded. Therefore SpiderOak never even sees unencrypted data. That's their "zero knowledge" policy. They think it's better to make it impossible for themselves ever to have any idea what files they're hosting, rather than saying "We used to know X seconds ago, but we don't know anymore."

The blog doesn't mention whether or not SpiderOak uses block-level deduplication. Maybe it's part of their storage infrastructure, maybe isn't. But all that client-side encryption would severely reduce the number of duplicate blocks even if everyone uploaded the same file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In a large enough population of data, collisions happen.

So you pick a hash function whose space is so large that the risk of collision is less than the risk of any other possible reason for accidental mis- identification (like all the file's bytes spontaneously switching to the collided file's bytes). You can have databases with trillions of objects with less than a one in a million chance of collision in a 256-bit space.

Realistically, there are a lot of things that are better to worry about than a one-in-a-million chance of losing a file. And if you really need so many objects that that's not enough, just increase the size of the hash space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes; if you increase the hash space sufficiently, these problems go away. I don't think wide hashing has really become a standard industry practice though, because services want to pick the option that is least burdensome to end users' CPUs. Another issue is that once they have a big de-duplication database established based on a particular hash, switching is expensive. I suspect a lot of shops are using md5 still.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps. That said, even a SHA-512 sum on my computer seems to take a little less than a CPU-second per hundred megabytes. Odds are you're not going to be uploading that fast, so you should be able to do that work "online" and not have a noticeable impact on either upload throughput or user-visible impact. This is doubly true on a multi-core device, since the sha sum I quoted was single-threaded. I would think the more important thing to minimize is user- impacting disk latency from the backup scan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In a large enough population of data, collisions [of cryptographic hash values] happen."

True, but this does not happen in practice. Using SHA-1 as an example hash function, you'd need about 10^24 different files before you would expect a 50% chance of a collision. You are not going to come anywhere near this limit, 10^24 different files have not been created during the entire span of human history.

<comment><AUTHOR> ... and yet SHA1 collisions have happened. According to NIST, "Federal agencies should stop using SHA-1 for...applications that require collision resistance as soon as practical"

Regrettably, we don't actually have any truly ideal hash functions yet.

<comment><USER6> Not that any of the rest of this argument makes much sense, but SpiderOak (says it) uses SHA256. There are no induced collisions on the horizon for SHA256, and there won't be accidental ones in this data set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting... Dropbox apparently does this.

This explains why adding the ubuntu netbook iso image to the Dropbox folder, synced in milliseconds.

My friend was going a little nuts wondering if Dropbox choked.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you've got a lot of pirated media use SpiderOak, otherwise use DropBox. Got it.

<comment><USER9> If you leave comments just to troll, do it often and stupidly. Got it! Disappointed over missing dropbox.com referral link :-(

<comment><USER8> I don't actually have a dropbox account, I was just being an ass. Probably shouldn't have posted that to begin with. I was in reddit mode.</comment></comment></comment>


Uberfact: the ultimate social verifier - <AUTHOR> http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfact-ultimate-social-verifier.html

<comment><USER2> It took a while to get there, but here's the relevance, I guess:

"Paul Graham's design for Hacker News tries to avoid the degringolade by actually using an oligarchy of human editors, including Paul himself, who will tweak hidden reputation scores. While this will certainly be an improvement on Reddit, I find it excessively algorithmic and antisocial. It has gotten past democracy, but it's not yet unapologetically medieval.

What I'd like to read at Hacker News is simply the set of links that Paul himself finds cool, or would if he had 80 hours a day to surf the net for links. Paul does not, in fact, have 80 hours a day to surf the net for links. But perhaps he has fifteen minutes to rate would-be toadies and henchmen, of whom he has I'm sure a large supply, who could then rate submitted contributions, and so on, producing a kind of ersatz impression of a massively overclocked Paul."

It's an interesting premise. What are my opinions if I had all the time in the world to figure out my opinion?

<comment><USER3> Opinions are computationally cheap and good-enough approximations of facts. If you had "all the time in the world", you wouldn't need to approximate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> interesting: "Factions are self-constituting - they are responsible for their own reputation algorithms. Anyone can start a new faction for any reason, but generally they form by the usual process of human group formation - one group gets too large and quarrelsome, and splits into parts."

From what I remember of social psychology, the perfect faction size is about 8 members. Once you go over that number new factions will form inside the original one... then again i think this only applies to people that meet face to face</comment>


Your phone could reveal your radiation exposure after a nuclear disaster - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/phones-reveal-radiation-exposure-after-nuclear-disaster <comment><USER2> I heard anecdotally that with those old civil defence gieger counters by the time the needle started moving you would be recieving a life threatening dose.</comment>